Mighty No. 9 Mega-Manning Up In June

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Mighty No 9 [official site] has a new release date, one that might actually stick: June 21st in North America and Asia, and the 24th elsewhere. Mighty No. 9, to refresh your memory so tired from all these things we’re expected to internalise in this day and age, is a new Mega Man-ish 2D shooty platformer from Comcept, the studio founded by Mega Man co-creator Keiji Inafune. They took to Kickstarter in September 2013 and drew a remarkable $3,845,170 (about £2.6 million) – still the fifth-highest amount a video game has raised on the crowdfunding site. Many miss that little roboman.

“Firstly, I would like to say again how sincerely sorry we are for how long we have kept all of our fans waiting,” Inafune said in yesterday’s announcement.

The Kickstarter had pitched an April 2015 launch, then the game was delayed to September, then February 2016, then to the broad spring 2016 season. Given that summer begins on June 21st, I guess they’re only narrowly missing spring.

How do we know this release date will stick? Inafune says the game has “gone gold”, which means they have the finished version of the game in hand. I’d say more about that term, but trying to explain physical media to young people such as your fine self is very tiring. It’s a term which used to refer to… like a plate, but instead of putting chard on it, you could save pictures of chard inside the plate, and we called the plate a disc, and this was a special plate used to create all the other chard, and to get the chard out of the plate you had to put it in… don’t worry, it’s not important.

The Controversy comes entirely from people who didn’t understand that:
1) Kickstarter is Venture Capitalism, NOT a marketplace. You’re not buying anything, you’re sponsoring a possibility.
2) Keiji Inafune is not a Magical Game Machine that can wiggle his nose and create games.

I feel the reason it’s ridiculous to a lot of people (including me)is that at this point it has been delayed four times, and that the solo content of the game is already done. What’s tripping up the game is the multiplayer content, which as far as I can tell was added as a last minute part of the Kickstarter. It’s not something considered part of the main game.

Its good that it has finally gone gold. We’ll all get to see what it is like in the next few months.